Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead the Email Semantic Indexing team supporting Outlook search and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The role owns the email indexing lifecycle and operational health, and drives improvements in freshness, completeness, performance, and cost efficiency. It enables rapid, repeatable experimentation and turns promising indexing approaches into production-ready capabilities in partnership with product, relevance, and model teams, using shared quality and cost evidence to guide decisions. The manager sets technical direction for email semantic indexing, including content processing, embedding generation, index updates, and integration with retrieval systems. The role leads architecture and design discussions, manages dependencies across teams, and guides planning, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and incident response. It also oversees service readiness and production health, incorporating telemetry, controlled experiments, security, privacy, accessibility, regulatory requirements, and Responsible AI practices throughout the software development lifecycle. As a people leader, the manager coaches and develops engineers, sets clear accountability, manages performance, and fosters an inclusive culture of technical excellence and continuous learning. The role also advances disciplined use of AI-assisted development, testing, debugging, and operational tools while maintaining human accountability for quality. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Employees are expected to bring a growth mindset, innovate, collaborate, and uphold respect, integrity, and accountability to foster an inclusive workplace.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or Bachelor’s degree and 12+ years of experience.
4+ years of people management experience.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop the team, model Microsoft leadership principles, foster an inclusive and accountable culture, coach engineers, support career growth, provide actionable feedback, and manage performance.
Set technical direction and own architecture and design decisions for email semantic indexing, including content processing, embedding generation, index updates, and integration with retrieval systems.
Evaluate technologies and balance quality, freshness, scalability, resiliency, and cost.
Partner with product management and engineering stakeholders to clarify requirements, define success measures, and create an executable roadmap.
Lead project planning, resource allocation, and dependency management; resolve cross-team issues to deliver end-to-end results.
Guide development of extensible, maintainable, secure, and high-performance software.
Establish rigorous design and code reviews, comprehensive test strategies, security testing, and automation across development and CI/CD pipelines.
Lead safe deployments, flighting, monitoring, incident response, and production debugging; ensure live-site ownership, escalation paths, disaster recovery, and rollback plans.
Use incident retrospectives to address root causes and prevent recurrence.
Establish telemetry and evaluation practices to understand indexing behavior and downstream retrieval impact; use feature flags, controlled experiments, and production signals to validate changes and guide investment.
Apply least-access principles and ensure email content and derived indexes respect access controls and applicable data-handling requirements.
Embed security monitoring, response readiness, AI safety, and compliance with privacy, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
Lead disciplined adoption of AI tools for development, testing, debugging, and operational workflows; measure effectiveness, maintain human accountability for quality, and improve engineering practices.